How do game-proxys minify network latency in their infrastructure? [closed]

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in South America, many gamers use something called a proxy service which takes their network connection, route's it through their own infrastructure and then exit close to the game server location.. E.g. they want to control that the TCP Traffic does not cross the USA for latency reasons.. So, how could they manipulate the path taken by a TCP connection ?

a) Do they just open up TCP conections in low traffic times (e.g. 4 in the morning) and then keep those for the rest of the day ?

b) Do they keep trying to open up TCP connections UNTIL they get lower latency one and then switch their internal traffic to that connection ?

c) Is the only thing they can do to minify TCP latency over long distances to rent private peerings or choose a hoster with good ones?

d) Could sending UDP packets over such distances reduce latency IF and only if you skip out packet loss (e.g. by sending the traffic redudant/multiple packets each) ?

It all boils down to the question whether u can control somehow what path a TCP connection takes or if you cant.

This talk is all about the networking part which is NOT about the endusers computer (Leantrix/TCP Optimizations) or the game servers.. They can somehow gain additional latency savings and im curious how they do it.

Thank you for the great year I've been with SO for now - its been a pleasure to talk to experts about stuff.

Answer 1

If you are referring to thins like Battleping and the likes, here's what someone has written in a forum that seems to make sense, i suppose the same holds true for South America. The relevant info is "SSH tunnel"

The advent of proxy tunnels came from the demand of Oceanic WoW players. Incase you don't know, the backbone connecting Oceania to America is a huge piece of shit and once you leave Australia/New Zealand packets gain an extra 200ms because gaming packets get shaped leaving our country, and then they get shaped going into America. Generally you can ping about 200~ to US Servers, but in real-time the game data will end up getting prioritized to hell and back and you'll have a latency of around 500.

The way Lowerping, Battleping and Smoothping etc all work are by establishing an SSH tunnel to a proxy in America and sending the SC2/WoW data through it. SSH traffic has much higher priority than gaming traffic does, so instead of being delayed, the data flies through. Afaik, it also doesn't get shaped as incoming traffic from the Blizzard serverside, because they're originating from a proxy inside of the US.

Feel free to correct me, I might be wrong on some things, but that's what I've picked up from using the very first tunneling service (Lowerping) since it came out

Answer 2

As per my knowledge proxy servers do not speed up your connection. They usually send your data through a longer path and the receiver will see the data packet as a packet originated from the proxy server.

The computer that sends data can not determine the path that it takes. It can only determine the end points. When connected to a proxy. The end point of the 1st trip is the proxy and then proxy retransmits the data packet to the second destination.Proxy is a special type of server configured for this retransmission.

Lets see the internet as a spider web. Then each joint is a router. These routers maintain a table called the 'routing table'. Routing table has information about where to foreword the data packets according to their destination. This routing table is updated automatically to send the packets in the shortest path.

So you see if we do not put any interference the data packets will go in the shortest path.

Now the exception, If the proxy service provider has a different private network connection from the proxy location to game server location (some thing like a privet highway with no traffic) the data packets can be delivered quickly. But this is a highly unlikely thing because no one will draw their privet wires around the world instead of already existing internet backbones.

Lets say

A - Origin

B - Destination

C - Proxy

Then, Normal way packets go

A -> B   (Quickest path determined by the routers)

With Proxy packets go,

A -> C  -> B  (Usually a longer path)

With a proxy and a high-speed privet network C-D (This is a highly unlikely scenario no one have such things.)

A -> C --(less traffic)--> D  -> B   (Can have a speed gain)

Some other ways of increasing the speed of the connection.

You can use UDP instead of using TCP. TCP usually has some error correcting features. All the routers double check the data to be correct. This slows down the data transmission. With UDP this error checking happens in a minimal level. So if you use UDP the transmitted data might occasionally has errors but will transmit quickly.

The stranded protocols that transmit data ie.HTTP has many fields other than the actual data. These are checksums, browser information, OS information etc. If you make a different protocol by removing these data, the amount of data to be transmitted become small. This will also speedup the communication.